PRABHUPADA’S LEGACY LIVES ON

“It’s an astonishing story. If someone told you a story like this, you wouldn’t believe it. Here’s this person, he’s seventy years old, he’s going to a country where he’s never been before, he doesn’t know anybody there, he has no money, has no contacts. He has none of the things, you would say, that make for success. He’s going to recruit people not on any systematic basis, but just picking up whomever he comes across and he’s going to give them responsibility for organizing a worldwide movement. You’d say, ‘What kind of program is that?’ There are precedents perhaps. Jesus of Nazareth went around saying, ‘Come follow me. Drop your nets, or leave your tax collecting, and come with me and be my disciple.’ But in his case, he wasn’t an old man in a strange society dealing with people whose backgrounds were totally different from his own. He was dealing with his own community. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s achievement, then, must be seen as unique.”

– Historian of Religion Prof Thomas Hopkins in Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna: Five Distinguished Scholars on the Krishna Movement in the West

This astonishing story has continued for many decades even after Hopkins’ insightful observation, though of course not at the same dramatic scale or pace. In this article, I will try to document how the legacy of bhakti-yoga that Srila Prabhupada brought to the world is continuing and expanding even now.

Srila Prabhupada wanted to share his love for Krishna with the whole world and to fulfill that divine aspiration he urged his followers distribute more books, build more temples and make more devotees. Therefore, the movement he started, popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement, has often used success in these activities as its definition of success. And rightly so, because these activities have been and will continue to be pivotal in shaping the movement’s composition, outreach and trajectory. But the movement often gets reduced to these highly visible activities alone, and much has already been written on these activities. Therefore, I will dwell on other ways in which the bhakti legacy moves on. I will not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the entire movement – that is a task best left to a historian. Nor do I claim that the examples of ongoing legacy I talk about are the most important or the most representative; these are just the examples that strike me from my limited perspective as a second-generational Indian member.

Emergence of a vibrant congregation

Perhaps the single most striking feature of the Hare Krishna movement’s history is its shift from a temple-based movement to a congregation-based one. The word ‘congregation’ is used conventionally to refer to any group of people who come together, often for religious purposes. However, within ISKCON lexicon, it refers more specifically to the householder devotees, in contradistinction with the renunciates.

ISKCON started in America and spread to other places in the Western world. In those parts, its devotional culture was so utterly different from mainstream Western culture that devotees felt the only way they could practice their adopted spiritual culture was by moving into the temple, which offered a safe haven from the materialistic outside world. Predictably, many of the movement’s initial members were renunciates. But as the years passed, most devotees found their initial zeal of having joined an exotic movement cooling down. And more and more devotees acted on their natural desire to get married and have families and careers. For its first decade or so, ISKCON had more than ninety percent of members residing in the temple. Now, it has more that ninety percent members staying outside the temple. This dramatic shift in demography initially caused some concern among some of the movement’s leaders that its spiritual standards would be diluted. But what emerged was not as much dilution as consolidation – devotees settled to a level of practice that they could sustain throughout their lives. Indeed, some congregation members have gradually become so dedicated as to manage entire temples themselves with no renunciates in the community. Even in many of the temples where renunciates are present in leading positions, the congregation still takes managerial initiative, and the renunciates often play only advisory and pastoral roles. Congregation members also occupy the highest ecclesiastical positions in the movement including those of gurus and Governing Body Commission (GBCs) members.

As the composition of the movement has changed from renunciates to householders, its mode of interaction with the world has changed from renunciation to penetration. In its first few decades, the robe-clad shaven-headed monks dancing and distributing literature on streets were the movement’s defining face. They exist even now, but they no longer represent the movement’s cross-section. A well-educated family with members in influential professional positions in mainstream society is as much integral to the movement as is the quintessential common man (or woman). The tech-savvy colleague sitting next to you in your office may well be a Hare Krishna, a modern bhakti-yogi who has both penetrated into and integrated with the mainstream culture. Each member performs, according to individual nature and commitment, a delicate dance of balance between tradition and modernity.

Establishment of vibrant systems of education

Srila Prabhupada emphasized that devotees study systematically the Vedic scriptures he translated and commented. Such study would deepen their philosophical conviction and fine-tune their spiritual practices. Accordingly, ISKCON temples diligently conduct a daily morning class on the sacred Srimad Bhagavatam, a devotional classic and a central book in the movement’s cannon. Additionally, ISKCON has come up with programs for systematic scriptural study catering to all its members from newcomers to seasoned practitioners. Most centers conduct periodically introductory Gita or yoga courses that give newcomers an overall grasp of the coherence and relevance of these wisdom-sources. For regular practitioners, many temples as well as specially customized educational centers offer the Bhakti Shastri course that provides progressive study of the movement’s basic canonical literature. With an ISKCON Board of Education in place for supervising pedagogical standards, thousands of students from all over the world have availed themselves of the course. Additionally, many devotee-communities have started schools for providing their children with holistic education – education that teaches not just material knowledge and skills that secular schools offer but also spiritual wisdom and values that the tradition offers. Further, for youth studying in universities, several temples have started customized youth centers near colleges. These centers provide students havens for community and spirituality – they are places where they can de-stress from the academic tension of their competitive careers.

Evolution of multifarious community support systems

The schools and other educational centers are just one of the community support systems that the movement has developed. ISKCON has been at the forefront in reaching out to the larger community through its extensive food relief programs. Hare Krishna Food for Life is the world’s largest vegetarian food relief organization. With projects in over 60 countries, it provides over 1.5 million free meals daily, including in disaster-struck areas in various parts of the world. The Indian wing of this initiative, ISKCON Food Relief Foundation, runs a “Mid-day Meal” program for school children, wherein it feeds over 1.2 million students from all backgrounds nutritious and delicious food.

To provide philosophical and practical guidance to members, devotee communities in various parts of the world have developed devotee care systems such as the counselor system. To help devotees find compatible spouses, marriage boards and other matrimonial portals, physical and digital, have been set up. To help train talented and dedicated young devotees to take up the mantle of the movement’s leadership and thereby facilitate a smooth succession from one generation of leaders to the next, various leadership-training forums have also been established.

Devotee-profession- als have also set up other community service centers such as hospitals and hospices. The bhakti tradition lays great importance on departing from the world in a spiritually conducive circumstance and consciousness. Accordingly, devotees have set up a hospice in the holy land of Vrindavan, where committed practitioners can prepare to face life’s final exam – death – in a setting that is medically competent and spiritually conducive. As their body takes its inevitable course towards destruction, their soul takes its conscientious course towards spiritual elevation, if not liberation. Similar hospices are coming up in Mayapur and other places too.

Spreading of eco-friendly culture

Srila Prabhupada repeatedly stressed the principle of simple living and high thinking – and wanted to demonstrate it through self-sufficient communities that featured God-centered eco-friendly living. In fact, in his cutting critique of the materialistic civilization encroaching recklessly on nature, Srila Prabhupada was remarkably prescient. Over the last four decades since Prabhupada’s critique, many studies have shown how indiscriminate exploitation of the environment has jeopardized the future of humanity, indeed of the earth itself. As the world is becoming increasingly aware of the staggering ecological and economic costs of our past centuries of environmental exploitation, green consciousness is rising. Bhakti-yoga takes this ascent of human consciousness towards its zenith in Krishna consciousness, which re-envisions the universe as a cosmic family with God as the father, nature as the mother and all living beings – not just human beings – as children.

This inclusive vision provides an additional impetus towards raising eco-awareness in the form of vegetarianism. (Studies have shown that the production and consumption of non-vegetarian food causes climate change much more than the pollution from all the world’s vehicles.) ISKCON has been a global pioneer in spreading vegetarianism, especially in the Western world. This pioneering is not just philosophical in terms of offering a more spiritual and dignified conception of our non-human brothers and sisters, but also practical – ISKCON through its many food distribution outlets provided profusely an array of delectable vegetarian cuisines of Krishna-prasad to a world that had mistakenly equated vegetarianism with a diet of just vegetables.

In addition to contributing to the mainstreamization of vegetarianism, ISKCON has also developed in various parts of the world eco-friendly communities that subsist on “the land, the cow and Krishna.” Initially these communities tried to avoid all modern things, but in time each of these arrived at its own balance regarding utilizing both nature’s resources and modern amenities. Today many of these communities serve as not just serene spiritual sanctuaries but also as crucibles of ecological research – they demonstrate prosperity through living in harmony with nature as a viable, even preferable, alternative to prosperity by exploiting nature.

Presence in the academia

No movement can exist in a social vacuum, oblivious to the intellectual and cultural trends of the larger society of which it is a part. A major place where such trends are understood is the academy with its study of religion being especially relevant to religious organizations. The academy shapes significantly public perceptions of a religion, especially in places where that religion is a minority religion and so is more learned than lived by the mainstream society. This applied to ISKCON in the Western world, where the bhakti culture ubiquitous in traditional India was seen as utterly foreign, if not incomprehensibly alien.

To help correct such perceptions, some devotee-intellectuals felt inspired to enter the academy for gaining formal training to present respectably the tradition’s voice in today’s multi-cultural milieu. Such an outreach of the tradition to the academy has important precedents – Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakura, the spiritual master of Srila Prabhupada, sent one of his scholarly disciples Sambidanand Das to London for doing his doctorate thesis on the history and the literature of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas. Traditionalists often find the academy’s approach to studying religion as distressingly unsympathetic to insider perspectives – the output of academic study can sometimes be summed in the epitaph, “Operation successful, patient dead.” Yet discerning traditionalists know that the academy will continue to shape the tradition’s public perception and if that perception is to reasonably reflect the reality of the tradition’s contributions, the onus falls not so much on academic scholars who are often not privy to insider perspectives as on insiders who need to academically train themselves to present the insider perspective in a manner intelligible to the outsider.

The late Tamal Krishna Goswami, one of the movement’s most prominent leaders and a sannyasi-guru, gave a major boost to the tradition’s thrust on academic penetration by himself entering into the academy and writing a seminal thesis on Srila Prabhupada’s theological contributions. Other devotee-scholars have written defining books on the other important leaders of the tradition – Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakura and Bhaktivinoda Thakura – as well as on the foundational books of the tradition, namely the Bhagavad-gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam. Satyaraja Dasa, along with other scholars, has founded a Journal for Vaishnava Studies that has become a major voice in the deep study of the Vaishnava tradition. Devotee-scholars joined hands with the broader Hindu community to set up the Oxford Center for Hindu Studies (OCHS) at Oxford to create a vibrant example of contemporary scholarship. In an academy shaped by Abrahamic stereotypes of religion and dominated by non-dualist perceptions of Hinduism, devotee-scholars have done pioneering work in ensuring that insider perspectives and the bhakti tradition are their due place in the academic study of Hinduism.

Of course, the legacy of love that is the bhakti tradition continues most vibrantly not in the external structures and systems but in the hearts of the thousands of practitioners for whom by their daily devotional and meditational practices Krishna becomes an increasingly intimate reality – a reality that they resourcefully share with others, thereby bringing serenity amidst anxiety, spirituality amidst materialism and purposefulness amidst pointlessness.

(This article is written in connection with the upcoming 50th anniversary celebrations of the establishment of ISKCON)